Sathnam Sanghera offers a brave, personal and damning take on the racist legacy Britain has just started to reckon with
Sathnam Sanghera’s two-part documentary on how imperialism has shaped Britain opens with a clear demonstration of one of its legacies. Namely, what happens when you dare to talk about it as a brown or black person.
“Such utter crap,” says the writer and journalist in the powerful opening moments of Empire State of Mind (Channel 4). “You are just another little man terrified of saying anything good about your benefactor.” Sanghera is reading aloud one of many letters sent to him (along with thousands of abusive tweets) since his book on the same subject, Empireland, came out at the start of this year. “The things we find dehumanising … for some white people are just an interesting intellectual debate,” he says. “For us it’s really depressing and personal.” Sanghera has learned to manage his feelings in public, but privately gets “deeply upset”. It’s at this point that he has to stop talking because he’s on the verge on tears. And I, a fellow fortysomething child of Indian immigrants, start crying on to my laptop.
